


Freely We Serve

by orphan_account



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Fem!Simon Lewis, Multi, Shadowhunter society, Simon-centric, Spoilers for CoHF (End), Spoilers for Shadowhunter Academy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-25
Packaged: 2018-05-23 07:06:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6108883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>'Freely we serve</em><br/>Because we freely love, as in our will<br/>To love or not; in this we stand or fall.'</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Simon Lewis' journey from mundane (amnesiac) to Shadowhunter; or:</p>
<p>A recovery period.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freely We Serve

.zero.  
  


There are people that exist in the world that are just _innately_ good at things.

Those naturally talented people, called prodigies and genius', are not as rare as one might think. One is normally blessed with talent from birth with at least one thing - be it something as stupid or inane as the ability to tie a perfect bow.

And then there are people like Simone Lewis, who has never been innately good at _anything_. That isn't to say she doesn't have talents - she _does_ \- but they came from hard work and practice. Her skill in archery was the product of many summers at camp and weekends in crowded, city shooting ranges and the sheer stubbornness of will to work around poor eyesight and fingers pained by the strain of both archery and instrument strings. Her talent for music was nothing spectacular, but she could play most any sheet music put in front of her, and if given advance notice of a day or so, could learn to play a song by ear. Any other skills she could lay claim to came out of similar labors of effort, determination and...not love, but a sense of masochistic enjoyment that came from accomplishing something.

Geeking out came to her naturally, but she highly doubted that counted as a recognizable talent, and even if it did, it definitely wasn't one that she could make a career out of.

However the few things she had worked to gain skill in - her computer skills, her music and archery - they were substantial enough that she felt as if she could make a career, something, out of them. She was content.

She was happy.

And then she was seventeen, and everything changed.

.one.

_I don't know what's wrong with her, Becky,_ Simone heard her mother's voice float upstairs from the kitchen as she sat, huddled, in the darkness of the stairway. _And she won't talk to me. Maybe you could come home for the weekend? See if she'll talk to you?_

The problem was, Simone didn't know what was wrong with her either.

 

.two.

No.

No, there wasn't anything _wrong_ with _her_. Not really, not technically.

There was something wrong with the world around her.

Simone didn't know how she just _knew_ this. But some part of her had noticed, realized it from a cage of thick glass within her. That part of her had been screaming and pounding at the unbreakable walls that surrounded it but she hadn't noticed, hadn't paid it any attention except for the small part of her that was insistent with, _this is wrong, this is_ not-right, _this is wrong_.

The internet told her she was depressed. Rebecca laughed and said she was paranoid. Her mother's worried eyes tightened in the corners and Simone wondered if she was thinking _crazy_.

They asked her if she wanted to talk to a professional.

Simone politely told them she didn't want to talk at all.

 

 

.three.

Life continued down this vein for a while. But a month passed, and then two, and Simone, _somehow_ , managed to pull herself out of her slump. The sometimes almost overwhelming sense of _wrong_ didn't leave her, hovered always at the back of her mind, at times rushing to the forefront with abrupt violence, but she learned to function around it. She smiled, paid attention in school, got her grades back up. Her life was normal once more.

Her mother smiled one morning, eyes suspiciously bright. _You're doing music again?_ She asked over breakfast, and Simone realized that she had been tapping her spoon rhythmically against her bowl without noticing - she was the main writer and composer for the band, and her creative process always started with beats via breakfast.

She hadn't even noticed she was doing it. But to be honest, she hadn't even noticed that she had ever stopped, really. She cast her mind back, trying to think of the last time she had put pen to paper and let music flow -

She came up blank. Frowning now, she thought on the last time she had met the boys for practice -

Months, at least. Her frown deepened, and her mother was still waiting on an answer. Simone simply gave a stiff nod, and avoided noticing her mother's discomfort at her curt response. Whatever was wrong with the world was wrong with her mother too, and Simone wasn't sure of why being with her hurt, why she was waiting at all times for the other shoe to drop, but no matter how she tried, she just couldn't seem to give her mother the benefit of the doubt. Some wounded part of her shied away from the idea.

It was entirely ridiculous. It was her _mother_.

Simone finished her breakfast in silence, consciously working not to tap her spoon against her bowl.

 

 

.four.

It had taken until that morning, but Simone now realized something - somehow, for some reason, she had been avoiding her friends. Eric, Kirk, Matt - had she even _talked_ to them recently? Her memory suggested otherwise.

So, that morning, she arrived at St. Xavier's early and headed straight to the one place she knew they'd be - the music department. Of course, since they were who they were, she heard them before she'd even entered the department proper.

"Hey, losers!" She called, forcing down the tightness that enveloped her at the thought of _talking to people who just wouldn't understand_ , and summoning a smile to her face.

The silence that echoed down the hall was almost deafening.

And then a herd of elephants apparently awakened from there hibernation within the schools cured sounding rooms because, from the third door on the left, three startled morons tumbled out with much stomping and wailing.

" _Simone?_ " It was Kirk who spoke, and his face was just as stunned as his voice. "What are you _doing_ here?"

Ouch. That hurt.

It was, however, deserved. After he'd said his piece, Kirk fell as silent as Matt and Eric, and all three proceeded to simply stare at her. Simone fidgeted in her spot, and resisted the urge to tug at the hem of her too short skirt, and old nervous habit. The skirt itself was a complete mistake - each consecutive year at St. Xavier’s had their own colours, this one red, and her mother had bought the skirt far too large for her, so she and Clary had tried to hem it in, and ended up shortening it too much for Simone's considerably conservative tastes...

...and what was she thinking about, again?

Right. The boys.

"I, um, I wrote a song," Simone deliberately did _not_ nervously push up her glasses. "Kind of. It's not done yet, but we could work on it..?" She trailed off into a deliberate hook.

It was Matt who grinned. "Queenie's back," he whispered loudly to the other two in a sarcastic 'aside,' while winking at Simone.

She smiled back at him, and Kirk and Eric joined in with a grin.

"Group hug!" Matt declared, and as one they rushed at her.

She laughed as they knocked her to the ground, and even with the empty sense of wrong that still pervaded her very being, this was the best she'd felt in months.

 

 

.five.

The slumps came and went. Like anyone, Simone had bad days and good days. On good days, she wrote music and went to Java Jones and kept her sadness on the inside. On bad days, she couldn't sleep, and tears traced their way down her face without her knowing why.

Today was, invariably, a bad day.

Rebecca had been in an accident. Not a severe one, the woman on the phone had reassured, but there were worries over a concussion that was possibly a fractured skull, and they were keeping her in for observation over a few days.

Simone had mid-year exams coming up. She couldn't _afford_ a few days off, not with how her slump had lowered her grades already. If she was going to pass this year, she needed the boost in her overall results the external marks from the exams would give her. So instead, she'd stay at home while her mother went to Rebecca.

This was a logical decision. It was smart, and Rebecca was in no way in life threatening danger, so why did Simone feel the need to do - _something? ANYTHING?_

She stood up from her desk abruptly. Heisenberg and his wavicles would have to wait, she couldn't focus, couldn't study when her head was pounding like it was.

Her feet took her to the upstairs bathroom - her bathroom, now that Rebecca lived in the dorms at her college. The lights flickered on as they always did once she hit the switch - slowly - and then both Simone and the small room were bathed in greenish light.

She met her own eyes in the mirror - they were the eyes of a familiar stranger. Who was this? Who was she? Why did nothing in life make sense anymore? What was she missing?

Her eyes narrowed in her reflection, and before Simone could even begin to make sense of her own body's decision to move, her fist had flung out, arm curving from her body in what she distractedly noted was one hell of a solid right hook, rooted properly and everything - and how did she know that, anyway? - and impacted against the mirror with a crystalline _crunch_.

Lines splintered along the mirror, but the shards did not fall from the already chipped and warped surface until she removed the pressure of her fist from where it had landed, just off center. She stared at her fist, utterly surprised by her own actions, and that was when the pain hit. It was a throbbing pain, not dissimilar to a pressure headache, and it seemed to coincide with the beat of her elevated pulse. She had broken through the skin of her knuckles, and blood oozed out of the wounds, down her arms and hands, before dripping onto the floor. On the floor were the large shards that had fallen from the mirror, shattered into smaller pieces by the impact of their fall. Silver dust clung to her fist and scattered around her bare feet.

Simone stood still and numb for maybe thirty seconds before reality came back to kick her into gear.

"Ouch," she said out loud, still staring at her bloody fist, and _why on earth did she sound bemused by that fact?_

This, more than anything else, cemented in her mind that there was something deeply and truly wrong with her. The world itself was still off, yes, but there was something about _her_ , too.

Acting as if on autopilot, she stepped over the mirror grit on the floor and moved up to the sink, turning on the tap and running her injured hand under the water as the flow went from red to pink to clear, and trying to ignore the soft _plink_ the small pieces of mirror glass she picked out from her wounds made against the ceramic side of the sink. Glancing up, about a third of the mirror, the top right third, still remained fixed in place, just enough to see her face. Same brown eyes as ever, same brown hair. Her skin, with its olive tone and natural tan, seemed as if it should be paler, but that could've just been the crappy lighting of the room.

The familiar stranger, she mused. Sometimes she felt as if she had no control over her life.

Her eyes fell on one of the larger, sharper shards that remained whole on the floor.

(Her mother returned three days later to a daughter with hair hacked short - the front brushing somewhere just between shoulder and chin, the back as short as military regulations - bandaged hands and scabbed up neck.

"Oh, Simone!" She said, arms reaching out to pat frantically at her youngest daughter. "What happened?"

Simone shied away, fighting back the impulse to - to run, to cover her neck, to break down crying because she didn't feel like her life was _hers_ , anymore - and decided that a strategic retreat was in order.

"Nothing," she said. "Nothing happened."

Nothing happened. Nothing was wrong.)

 

 

.six.

Though Simone had stayed at home and avoided the hospital because she needed to study, couldn’t afford to miss school, she'd ended up having three bad days in a row. Walking into the soundroom that they had claimed as their own when they'd first started as St. Xaviers the next morning, she was greeted by silence, stunned silence.

Then, whistles.

"Hot, Queenie," Matt greeted. "Why the change?"

"Reasons," Simone shrugged. "It was time."

Matt nodded as if this made perfect sense.

"Speaking of change," Eric spoke up. "We think it's time for another - your hair looks great, Simone - we should re-christen Millennium Lint. In honour of other changes."

"You've just gotten bored of Millennium Lint," Matt accused.

"Rotten Potatoes," Kirk threw out, which was always his first suggestion when they changed the band name. It was always shot down, yet he always suggested it - it was just tradition by now, even if they couldn't figure out if he was being serious or no.

"So what if I have? We've been Millennium Lint for a good four months now, at least. Our frontrunner has changed her image and therefore we must follow, Matt."

"Hold on," Simon interrupted. "Since when am I the frontrunner of the band?"

They all stared at her like she was crazy.

"You're the singular girl," Kirk said slowly, as if he couldn't believe she wasn't on the same page of all of them. "You draw in the girls and the guys - through girl power and fanservice. Sort of."

"Kirk's right, if not in phrasing," Eric interjected. "And besides, you write most of the music."

"I just play the bass guitar," Simone complained. "I'm not cut out for frontrunner."

"You could sing," Matt suggested. "We've heard you when you run through the songs to translate your vision to us. You've got the voice to pull it off."

_Yeah, but not the confidence_ , Simone thought. "Regardless, not the issue right now. Do we really have to change the name? I like Millennium Lint. It brings to mind Star Wars. And chocolate, for some reason."

"And laundry that hasn't been done for a thousand years," Eric muttered. It was always Eric who pushed for a name change. He claimed it was because they hadn't found The One yet. Simone theorized he just got bored of having the same name. He was static like that.

Simone sighed. " _Not_ Rotten Potatoes," she said, before turning to her battered notebook filled with half completed lyrics and barely physical music.

Her muse had visited her properly for the first time in what felt like forever, and she was not going to let it escape her again.

Pen to paper, the words just flowed out of her as the melody slowly picked itself clear from the foggy recesses of her mind, and she mused on Matt's words.

After all, she couldn't imagine this song being sung by anyone but her, and she _wanted_ to share it, as if somehow it could fix what was wrong with the world around her.

If I cut the strings that hold me hostage, Would I fall and shatter? If that is what it takes to breathe again then would it even matter?  


 

.seven.

"Yeah," Kirk said, two days later, when she walked into Java Jones and slammed her notebook down on the table in front of him. "I am _not_ singing that." He glanced up quickly. "No offense, Simone."

She shook her head, still feeling the bizarre sensation of phantom hair where there was none now. "None taken. It sounds kind of silly, and it's a very specific song. I wouldn't even let you try to pull it off, you'd butcher it." She smiled at him. "No offense."

Kirk shrugged.

"More than anything," Matt interjected. "It's very..." He hesitated. "...poppy. Techno."

Eric grunted.

"You said we were re-christening the band," Simone reminded them. "Less covers, more originals, means genre branching. I can't sing screamo or growl the way Kirk can, but I can sing this. Ballads, pop songs, soft rock. _That's_ the future of the band."

Matt perked up. "You'll sing?"

Eric grunted. "The band?"

Simone nodded, to the both of them. "I've thought of a name," she said and pushed bright red frames up. "It came to me in a dream." She turned the page over, and there, written in gold and black gel ink, accented by faint whispers of angels wings and great broadswords in delicate silvery grey lead.

the mortal instruments

Eric tilted his head. "Isn't it a bit hipster?"

"Dude, we're not solid rock anymore." Matt reminded him. "The frontrunner has spoken. We are now indie-rock. Hipster is in."

Kirk nodded. "I don't get it," he said, "but it sounds cool."

Eric squinted. "The art is nice." He looked up at Simone, sitting across from the boys nervously on the other side of the table, awaiting their opinions and judgement. "Did you design it yourself?"

Simone nodded.

Eric tilted his head, obviously deliberating. Simone held her breath. The guys would follow her into the genre shift - of course they would, she was the visionary when it came to music - however it was Eric who was the visionary when it came to _image_. Eric had the last say on the names they put forth, who had the final say on gig night wardrobes. He was basically the Simon Cowell of the group, and this name was, for some reason, deeply important to Simone. It was that One Eric was waiting on for her, and if the next words out of his mouth were any variation of 'it's a no from me,' she would probably lunge across the table to punch him.

Finally, he grunted. "It'll be a pain to paint that onto the drum kit."

Simone let out a squeal.

 

 

.eight.

This was the way those last weeks of normality progressed and ended. The monotony of school, the excitement of remaking the band from scrap metal into shining chrome. This was what they were always meant to be, this was them being serious. New York alone probably had thousands of wannabe bands looking to make it big in the big apple, but The Mortal Instruments had promise, far more so then when they had been Millennium Lint, and Millennium Lint had had little to no problem finding gigs, somehow.

It was about three am, the morning of the day before their first real gig as The Mortal Instruments, and what Simone needed was to destress. She pulled out her phone, opened up google, double checked the opening time of Arty's Archers (a twenty-four hour archery range mid-city), and slung the bag holding her fiberglass recurve bow over one shoulder. She double checked the side pockets of the bag, noting that her clicker, bracer, finger tab, and nocking point were packed. Over half the time she didn't end up using either the clicker or nocking point, but it was always nice to have the option. She didn't bother with arrows, she'd just rent a quiver of blunts when she arrived. Before making to leave, she quickly pulled her bow out of its bag, and with a quick _twang_ , she dry loosed the string. Technically unhealthy for the bow without an arrow to be loosed - it could damage the tension of the string, among other things, but just once wasn't too bad, and it satisfied Simone that her bow was in working order. There were other options among what Rebecca jokingly called her 'armory,' the compound bow she favoured, for one, and an old Japanese longbow she'd bought on a whim and used a total of maybe three times, but for times when she wanted to clear her head of nothing but the satisfying _thunk_ of arrows hitting their target, her recurve bow was the best.

Her father had used a recurve bow, before they lost him.

She made her way to the range, and it was there she stood for the next three hours, shifting and adjusting her position as needed, switching from aiming for bull's eyes to aiming for consecutive circles or certain clock positions.

By the time it was seven thirty, she had showered, changed into her uniform, and returned her rented arrows to the bored looking receptionist who was apparently in dire need of coffee; and was ready to head to St. Xavier's. Thankfully, the school itself had an archery team (though she'd never joined) so she probably wouldn't get either accosted or in trouble for carrying around what was technically a lethal weapon - the reason she hadn't taken any arrows with her from home.

Checking her phone as she set off at a brisk walk, almost a jog, Simone saw she'd missed several calls from her mother, and one from her sister. Thumbing in Becky's number, she raised her phone to one ear and slowed her pace as St. Xavier's loomed.

" _Simone! Are you okay?"_

"What? Yeah, I'm fine," Simone said. "I left home early, mum was still asleep. I must've forgot to leave a note."

Rebecca sighed. _"You're a real genius, you know?_ "

"I can be," Simone answered mildly. "It's a gift."

The sisters exchanged banter for the next few minutes, before the first warning bell rang. Promising to call later that night, Simone hung up on Becky, before heading into the school grounds proper.

Little did she know at that time, her world was about to change forever.

A paradigm shift was coming.

**Author's Note:**

> Been meaning to work on this for a while, ever since finishing Shadowhunter Academy. (I'm still mad at the ending)
> 
> Everything is essentially, the same - except Simon is a girl. I wanted to focus in a bit on the sexism and ass-backwards traditionalist ways of Nephilim society that there are hints of - oh sure, they treat old-blood female Shadowhunters well, but how would they treat a previously mundane one? 
> 
> Thus this fic was born.
> 
> Slow updates will be slow.


End file.
